S and s glass
This sort of ‘nanny’ regulation goes against every personal responsibility and freedom grain in my body, but if there are already slack standards of personal behaviour, booze will only fuel the race to the bottom. Get rid of the booze: It is no longer acceptable for alcohol to be consumed in most workplaces. This requires cooperation from the lay divisions of parties, but really, they ought to appreciate that the electorate needs another careerist politician like a hole in the head. They will be better able to develop and appreciate the impacts of policy if they have some notion of how it actually affects the community.įurther, if staffers want to run for office, there should be a clear term between them finishing as a staffer and being eligible for preselection. A person has a much better grasp of community values and expectations when they haven’t lived in a political or public service bubble their entire working lives. Staff, particularly advisory staff, ought to have a minimum of three to five years working in the private or not-for-profit sectors before working at Parliament House. You are the company you keep: The days of Parliament House being the political Wet & Wild Waterpark for the immature, ignorant, and ambitious needs to stop. Rather, we should be encouraging talented and decent people to enter politics by improving preselection processes and the nature of the destination. Senator Lidia Thorpe disproved that trope to perfection just last week. It’s unwise to assume that, simply by virtue of being women, women are more decent or are better suited to parliament. Tipping more women into politics achieves little more than tipping more women into politics. And while I’m here, let’s disabuse ourselves of the idea that quotas are the simple answer to this complex issue. Don’t expect standards to improve if politics remains the well-trodden path for pawns, hacks, and apparatchiks of either gender. By ‘best’ I mean independent thinkers people with life experience and an eagerness to serve. Send our best and brightest: We should be delivering some of our best to Canberra. The Jenkins report details 28 recommendations which deal directly with the present issue, but there are things that can be done to effect broader cultural change. A bipartisan approach for broad cultural change will result in a better overall solution. We need buy-in from everyone to achieve real cultural change as opposed to a political grenade or a short-term fix for electoral survival. This is too important an issue to die on this hill a hypocrite. That is, despite the majority of the victims being women, the majority of men are not offenders in fact, most men find this behaviour abhorrent. While the Jenkins report found that the majority of victims of sexual assault are women, it also found that women were most likely to engage in bullying and that those who engage in this conduct likely have multiple victims. And that is a great shame, for it silences victims who do not fit the headline narrative – excludes real suffering in the name of political expedience. Unfortunately, it’s been weaponised due to the irresistible political convenience in couching this as a ‘Liberal Party has a problem with women’ issue. This isn’t the cut and dry gender issue the activists pretend that it is. Instead, the aim should be to implement clear and effective procedures for reporting, referring, and disciplining. There is no magic wand the Prime Minister can wave which will stop it occurring in and around Parliament House. The fact is sexual assault, sexual harassment, and bullying are already illegal. We need to correct without over-correcting. No one ever said, ‘I got angry and emotional and made awesome strategic decisions!’ It started with Brittney Higgins’ rape allegations, ended with Kate Jenkins’ ‘Set the Standard’ report, and in between, there were various other drizzles of kerosene on the fire: a new allegation, a new angle, a new low in human behaviour.Īnd it’s hard to not be emotional about it, but I keep reminding myself that we all need to be dispassionate so we can clearly articulate the issues and formulate effective solutions. The 2021 federal parliamentary sitting year has been plagued and book-ended by allegations of poor behaviour.